Tariff calculation system "GoTas"

Gothaer Insurance is one of Germany's top 20 insurance companies. Until 2011 Gothaer had only an older and no longer adequate Excel application to support their sales force in selling commercial insurance tariffs. Under the responsibility of the business units in charge and in continuous cooperation with IT we used kenroadsDesigner to develop a more advanced and functionally enriched tariff calculation and proposal system. Starting with commercial insurance tariffs the solution was extended briefly afterwards to cover private insurances, too.

In order to achieve the migration as resource-saving for Gothaer as possible, all "Planner" activities were carried out by kenroads iS in the first project phases. Because of kenroadsDesigner's unique concept our Planner was able to prepare all required specification documents, even if she had no specific insurance know-how at all at this time. Quickly and easily generated prototypes could be used in only few iterative workshops with affected business people to further refine the application and finalise the user interface.

GoTas was launched into production early in 2011 and is now used by Gothaer's complete sales force (own agents as well as free brokers). Maintenance and further development has already been handed over to Gothaer.

 In Gothaer's Broker Portal GoTas is described as follows:

 
The main reasons for Gothaer's decision to develop the new system with kenroadsDesigner had been:

• Significantly lower project costs in comparison with traditional development approaches.
• (For Gothaer possibly even more important) kenroadsDesigner allows the business unit to gain some development autonomy which in turn let them influence time-to-market for new tariffs far more directly.

For IT, too, the project has brought about advantages. They no longer have to maintain a niche application and successfully have made resources available for mission-critical projects. Maintenance of the new solution will be done in the business unit itself, while standard compliant kenroadsDesigner's generation features ensure full compatibility with the IT environment.

As a next development step, it is planned to support straight through processing of insurance proposals by connecting GoTas to backend systems via kenroadsDesigner's XML interface.